The Griffith Asia Institute welcomes its latest visiting fellow, Professor Zhou Li from the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University of China.

Professor Zhou has a PhD in Economics from Fudan University and a postdoc from Tsinghua University. His major research areas are rural finance, rural sustainable development, food security and sovereignty, and rural cooperatives.

He is among an emerging group of scholars in China who advocate and practice an academic approach that emphasizes the promotion of knowledge through intensive and extensive fieldwork.

‘This approach pays full respect to local knowledge and endogenous experiences. However, (obtaining) this knowledge and experience often has wider, if not universal implications’, said Professor Zhou. ‘Based on my research on rural development, I argue that the old, top-down arrangements in rural development in China did not and will not work. What we need is a genuinely endogenous institution that stems from rural communities’.

Professor Zhou has been the sole author of five books and has edited over ten volumes, some of which are with major Chinese publishers, such as Regional Financial Development and Economic Growth in China (1978–2000) (Tsinghua University Press, 2004). He has also published over 200 academic pieces in a wide variety of influential domestic and international journals, including Modern China, China and World Economy. He has also been the recipient of more than ten national research grants.

Over the years, Professor Zhou has visited research institutions in more than twenty countries. The aim of his visit to the Griffith Asia Institute is to further extend his existing collaborations with the research team at the Institute and examine projects that look at the making and implementation of rural policies in China.